Be Positive!

“Introspectively and in retrospect, this nation began its journey with nil..zero capital, baffled identities, ill political maneuvering, death of intellectuals, plight that came from natural disasters..the list goes on! Some would say 42 years should have been long enough for the wounds to heal but what about the ones that strike us down continually on a daily basis in the guise of corruption, treason, derailed govt regulations? And despite all that it is being said that Bangladesh "is one of the fastest growing developing countries", "has made remarkable progress in declining child and maternal mortality", "8 million Bangladeshi overseas workers in more than 155 countries, who remitted over $14 billion in 2012", "is one of the world's leading exporters of ready-made garments, ranking second in the world after China". Let's take a moment to contemplate the positive progress we have made so far, because to be honest, we could do with a bit of positivity right now! "

This pronounced statement above was the result of my positive-ranting (yes there is such a thing, only in my books though, I too often wonder if I do not have a biological defect!) resulting in a facebook status back at that time, at the end of February, when an apparent positive affair called the ‘Projonmo Chottor’ made me witness things I had neither heard nor expected in the history of this nation - Bangladesh! These two simple words, together, produced a platform that put forward a belief, resurrected an emotion in every single Bangladeshi, which at least our generation, the millennium, who had grown up only been regaled with tales of heroism from 1971, was suddenly awarded with an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of! All those hundreds of movies(when one thinks about a Bangladeshi movie or drama serial, you can only see visuals of 71!) that we had been watching ever since we were born, all the brilliant anecdotes recounted by our mothers and grandmothers so often that they came alive in front of our eyes and suddenly all those pent-up emotions revealed like a bare wound, in public, to be critically assessed, by those two really simple words! Those, couple of months, were tough I must admit.

I must also admit that I did not expect any specific outcome out of the movement from the beginning. Yes, even an overly emphatic optimist as myself! It was not like I did not want our lives, or the lives of the citizens living in Bangladesh at the time, to experience something as brilliant as the stories depicted so often on celluloid: a raging war, arrival of a messiah and a happy ending. As much as I enjoy an unhealthy dose of a Bollywood flick every now and then, even I am more realistic than that! Sometimes I blame these unrealistic portrayals in cinema for raising our expectation bars so high that real life cannot cope with it!

What did we expect? Suddenly a hero was going to descend from the seventh heaven, okay, let’s say from amongst this bunch that founded the chottor, fight our battles, awaken us from this nightmare that we call life here and basically rescue us while we stand on the sideline, all safe and secure, under the protection of our family names and inherited power and only contribute to the war cry? Sorry but I just smiled out of grief and I believe all the thousands of heroes that once made our blood boil, from celluloid to real life, from William Wallace to Bhagat Singh, all just ganged up on me and smiled the most derogatory smile I have ever seen! Battles are not won that way, fights are not fought that way and life, my friend is not that easy, they say. Some things can only be achieved the good old-fashioned way!

It would be fair to say I did not mind the effect that Projonmo Chottor was able to create – a reason to unite, stand together – and I would risk sounding like a broken record if I repeat all that I had said back in early February 2013. I did absolutely jump on the bandwagon, locally and overseas, virtually and in real life, I debated in my sleep over sweat and blood! But it was not in the hope of seeing sunshine, no, because I believe the only place capable of producing sunshine is not somewhere we can spot outwardly, but lies within the deepest wells of our soul, in each of us. It lies with our core belief. And that belief had moved mountains centuries before us and is still capable of doing so! Then why does the human form this energy takes distract us? Why do we doubt in our own individual power to change this world?

In a matter of a few months I witnessed families drifting apart, friends turn foes, couples breaking up – I must admit these were astounding feats! Never before had I seen this country or its countrymen displaying such deep-rooted, brash emotion towards anything other than that, which concerned their bread and butter. It was impressive. We can argue through our teeth over why and hows and also who was behind the ‘show’ but the motion was a success from the go!

The sad part, personally though for me, lies in the fact how a dark eerie shadow seem to lurk behind every Bangladeshi citizen in the form of this negative energy. If it was the Treta Yug or epoch, when Lord Rama lived, I would have vouched it was the work of the evil Asuras! Because it is not just in matters related to this nation that we are negative about – it is anything and everything! Say you pay a compliment to someone within the earshot of another, within seconds the eavesdropper would feel the need to make up some story to make the person spoken about sound horrible! The Asuras may have lost in the Tetra Yug but alas, the presence of the evil still lives and will only be defeated once and for all when each of us, individually and intrinsically, delve into that well of power and declare war! A war against everything that is wrong in our backyard, in our vicinity and a war against everything big and small we have been silent about for so long!

A messiah has arrived – can you see? It is YOU. 

P.S. For the umpteenth time, NO I am not under the influence of anything when I talk dirty-positive! Ask my friends and family - they shall vouch for it!

MUSE

To Dhaka,

My muse, my mistress, my beloved.

(Quote abridged; original unfit for publication.)

My words are beginning to define me. I have realised lately, like a crinkly old man, I too have a twinkle in my eyes, and have grown quite fond of reminiscing and invariably my muse metamorphose into my words. Ah the sweet smell of nostalgia! It starts with a rumble in my belly and flows through my veins as though glow-in-the-dark and touches the finish line by settling as the twinkle in my eyes! I have already played so many different roles in my life so far, swallowed and regurgitated so many others that often when I get nostalgic, I have to pinch to remind myself - I am only 27 after all!

The particular aspect of my musings that bring me to address you in this monologue today is very vague. I have come to realise one thing that though all the posts and stands I have made in this blog so far had been controversial one way or the other, they were never entirely taboo in nature.  They are everyday issues that we all think about but they tend to get buried in our subconscious for so long that we cease to question them and accept them as a way of life. I have made it my personal business to prod those very crevices of discomfiture and draw a reaction. Today, however, I shall refrain from stating the obvious and rather locate the lesser-known, subtle issues that float around our brains but does not quite surrender.

I have had quite a strange childhood. Even though I clearly belong to the apparent ‘upper-class’, egotistic and self-engrossed section of the society, I have been raised to think differently. Believe me, my parents did me no favour by trying to establish these morals at such an early stage because at 12, when you want to buy a perfume because all your girlfriends own one – you just want to buy a perfume! And a serious reprimand as a result with vicious connotations such as ‘can you justify spending that amount of money on a bottle of fragrance? What about the opportunity cost?’ and the conversation taking a more emotional turn next ‘do you realise how hard you need to work in life to earn every single penny?’ fell into deaf ears. However, almost a decade later when the sweet smell of nostalgia wafted its way through my nose, it bore those solid messages home and helped me understand that those long ago sessions of admonishment, surreptitiously fuelled a perception revolution and gave oxygen to my musings.

A part of me always detested money and what it inspired. I liked to fondle with the idea of power but something about the riches made me uncomfortable and I did not wish to be associated with. One of my father’s and later my own favourite movies was a black and white, Indian one from the 50s called ‘Shree 420’. Here, the young protagonist was a simple village-boy who comes to Mumbai in search of work and a better life. He befriends a group of slum-dwellers who embrace him as their own and one of them - a schoolteacher that he later falls in love with. Through all the twist in the tale, he eventually comes in contact with the elite part of the society and transforms into this smug pseudo gentleman, ashamed of his roots and affiliation with the poverty-stricken part of the society. He takes to drinking and gambling and even ditches his old girlfriend in rags for a richer, sophisticated, cigarette-smoking female. Like all other overly optimistic Indian movies, this too ends in the hero seeing the error in his ways, asking for forgiveness and being reunited with both his old friends and lover in a well-coordinated song and dance sequence! It was a laughably simple script but emphasising a lot of old and forgotten values that we used to once hold dear.

Upon returning to Bangladesh with an intention to settle for the foreseeable future, I realised how differently I viewed this part of the world in comparison to my earlier cynical perception. I blame it solely on my tired eyes from before as opposed to the newly travelled ones. Sometimes, it becomes vital to step away from the matter at hand to be able to objectively look at it and I have come to realise only travel can open that little window in your mind for you. The exposure I have had in the past few years has opened my eyes to how every society has their own evils to thwart and the difference is just in the seriousness of the issue and the closest, most comparable scenario perhaps is the financial instability that we individually face in our lives: I do not believe anyone would be able to claim they are cruising without any financial restraints, the difference is just that for some it is survival at stake and for others, a better standard of living! But a struggle remains, be it a first-world or a third-world nation and this struggle should not be able to deny us the right to take pride in our existing achievements.  It would be rather unjust to forget that the history of this Indian civilization began almost 500,000 years ago and that the Indian subcontinent (present day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) where the Indus Valley civilisation flourished made it one of the major civilisations, the most sophisticated and technologically urban culture between the 2600 and 1900 BCE! It is sad if we choose to be ignorant about our history and not acknowledge the fact that we are sitting on a goldmine of an ever-evolving culture! Let us scour through the negativities, in an attempt to progress, without loosing sight of our achievements in our contemplation and pay credit where credit is due.

Last time I saw the back of Bangladesh, it was with a lot of negative and frustrated emotions. I felt there was no room in this country and the particular money-driven society that we nurture, for an idealist like myself and I had to trot halfway across the globe and get acquainted with several other dreamers caught up in the same struggle - only smarter and more successful in the broader sense of the word – to finally convince myself that I did not loose my marbles and to restore faith in my values and more importantly my dreams. Dreams do not necessarily imply impractical, unachievable or a fool’s vision of life. And everything old is not redundant either. Be it the black and white movies like Shree 420 or the words of wisdom imparted by our parents/grandparents almost threatening to cause semantic satiation, the implicit and explicit message respectively is still valid in today’s world. In an attempt to globalise, while it is crucial to gain a worldly vision, let us not loose the very core values and traditions our ancestors have fought so hard to preserve.  Let the perfect marriage of old and new rather define our identity.